Secrets To Our Turn-on:
How Our Female Cycle & Brain Rhythms Affect Our Libido.
One moment you are so horny that even the furniture looks exciting and you start doing a lap-dance for your couch.
In the next days, you are bursting with irritability and wish the world would go away and stop demanding of your time and energy.
Yet at times, nothing could be more delicious than silky PJs and a snuggle while watching a great movie.
And at its worse, you are depressed and feel horribly fat and unattractive, wondering why your partner is still interested in you.
Are you psychotic?! No, you are female.
And as women, we are ever-changing, unpredictable, and exquisitely linked to the ebb and flow of our hormones.
Those who love us, revel in these shifts, while other runs for the hills.
Discovering Our Pleasure Gears
As much as we do not enjoy our body being referred to as cars, our hormones actually behave a little like a gear shift.
We have a high and low gear, as well as neutral and reverse.
High gear is our testosterone. This is when we are more aggressive, outgoing and go for what we want.
Low gear is estrogen combined with oxytocin and represents our proceptive or seductive nature. Here we are more alluring and coy, the ‘come hither and claim me’ version of ourselves.
Neutral is estrogen on its own and it is, well, neutral. We can ‘take it or leave’ albeit sex, affection, socializing, etc.
Reverse is a mix of progesterone, prolactin, vasopressin, and serotonin. This literally can make us go in reverse and shut-down any of our desire and our ability to seduce and attract. It is our ‘leave me be or suffer the consequences’ gear.
Through understanding and navigating our hormonal peaks and valleys, we create more ease both for ourselves and those around us.
Girl Brain – Boy Brain?!?
But it doesn’t end there (if that was not already enough!).
Our cycles are not only fluctuate between hormones, but also the two hemispheres of our brain!
The ‘Blooming Phase’ is a time of the month where we are more in our left brain and more rational and focused.
While, in the ‘Cocooning Phase’ time of the month, we are in our right brain and emotional and intuitive.
Forcing ourselves to stay in our left brain for the entire month, we literally expect ourselves to be constantly focused and rational.
When we refuse to explore our right brain and constantly ignore our deeper emotional and intuitive signals, we disrupt Natures way of creating an exquisitely balanced and expressed life!
Only looking at the bright side of life, we cut ourselves off from invitations to develop our insight and consciousness.
While most of us are pros at our ‘Blooming Phase’. As this is when we have the most beauty, aliveness, and enthusiasm for things outside of us.
Yet it is vital to our well-being.
When we forget to respect our natural rhythms or cycles, we start to directly compromise our system.
Continuing to do so, day in and day out, our body will eventually rebel and gift us with an imbalance such as obesity, chronic fatigue, and other issues.
We need to go in.
To take the time to be honest with ourselves and to discern what is no longer working in our life.
It is also a time to acknowledge and birth our deeper calling.
Do you know your deeper calling?
Turn-on, believe it or not, is not just hormonal or part of our brain-waves. It is also living a life of deeper meaning.
If our sole meaning is our relationship or our kids or our job, we may feel like our passion, our umph for life has kicked of its dance shoes and retired.
Yet inside each of us is a deeper passion.
Something, if acknowledged, would reignite us and flush our cheeks with rosy enthusiasm.
Our deeper calling.
No matter what age we are, it is never too early or too late to tune into the source of our own passion.
The beauty is that it is calling us, day in and day out. Whispering to us through silent yearnings and screaming fits of emotion.
We would find not only a renewed sense of purpose, we would also notice that our hormones jig to the tune of succulence.
If we would only listen… and then act.
Discovering our cyclical nature and living with deep alignment to our own inner truth and inspiration is part of my core message.
Start to uncover your own cyclical wisdom and living a passionately inspired and juicy life!
The time is now.
If it feels delicious to explore this concept of your cyclical nature, you may enjoy my book: The Emergence of The Sensual Woman. Be sure to put your name and email address below and join thousands of like-minded women in revolutionizing your sensual self today.
Thank you for your enlightening knowledge! This is truly a pearl for us women to start living and understanding our selves from a cyclic perspective! Not that it will make the men more patient 🙂 but at least they don´t need to take womens “rejections” personal any longer! Fantastic. Such a revelation for all couples. Keep on spreading your amazing knowledge and radiance.
I have got a question. I am a 20-year-old who wants to know about preservation through tao-exercises. I am about to go into a very dear relationship but we both don’t want a child right now (still got some time on that topiv 😉 ). so I once read in a book called the ‘tao of sexuality’ about an exercise that a woman can do which will make her body not building up the uterus to be ‘ready for the egg’ but using these ‘resources’ to contribute your whole own body…so you would not come to have a period anymore and so on…is this possible? and how would that feel? i mean in terms of hormones and cycle – there wouldn’t be one anymore, would it? so, i guess my question is if you might have more informations about this? i would be soo pleased to hear it, i just stumbled across your page and for me you seem like the first woman (almost 😉 ) that shares the views that i have on sexuality. and as i don’t want to take hormones (the pill) and i am not quite happy with condoms in a stabile relationship i would really love it to find this kind of solution. may you help me?
thank you very much in advance 😉
greetings and much love from germany, susan
*I meant prevention, not preservation ^^ and also – please don’t get me wrong, I am definitly interested in the spiritual aspects this would bring to me also, even if prevention is my first intent here.
Great article!
If only our world was more women friendly.
When Richard Branson asked what was the first thing one would change to attract more women to leading positions, i replied with “respecting our rhythms will be the first great step into that direction”
It seems as if the world only wants us, women, to be in top shape whole months round, ready, very YANG. But the reality is, it is exhausting… and sooner or later you will start to develop health problems.
Even though I’ve been in full menopause for 5 years, I still feel the ebb and flow cycles within my body, particularly within my womb. In my years of working with women, assisting them in “reversing the curse” meaning helping them to understand and experience the blessings and power of menses and the regenerating power of the menopause creativity and deepening fertility, it’s become evident that we have patriarchal conditioning with respects to our life cycles and we have beliefs that limit our understanding of the sacredness of our womanly ways! For example, when women move into peri and full menopause, we believe that we’re no longer fertile or ripe! Now, our capacity to have a baby has passed, but we’re being called to go deeper into our body wisdom and birth something new for the planet.
Very interesting,but not yet clear to me…as women we have “gears” when different hormons are prevalent, and a “right” or “left” brain fase during the menstrual month.but how to know when do these differences take place?how do I know in which gear am
I at the moment,or when I am
bleeding?i would love to know it! so that I could plan my life according to my fases,and be more efficient and happy!help:)
Thank you Ariana, great question!
You are in your RIGHT brain after ovulation until menstruation and in your LEFT brain from menstruation to ovulation….
As for your gears… we cycle through hormones daily as well as monthly, so before getting too involved in planning your life around a ‘set’ schedule (even if there a particular rhythm if you are in your fertility years), I would invite you to discover what your gears are by paying attention to how you feel each day and mapping it out. This is really important so that you are coming from the inside-out in your approach to Succulent Living.
I always enjoy all your articles! Yes, I would like to share!
yes
For me the article has some relevance & presents some good points yet there is so much more to being a woman than hormones, cycles & left & right sided brain capacity. These characteristics are only part of the picture & even if we know about them sometimes its not possible to follow logic/reason or rhyme instead, we prefer to react to the feelings we have at the time. Tuning into yourself can be pretty difficult, because as ‘women’ we are expected to be everyone’s confidant, mother, nurturer, rescuer, lover & soul sister. And to ourselves we give very little with few, if any expectations of how we should be treating ourselves. Often our excuses “i’m tired, I’m too busy, I’m over it” get in the road of taking time out to reconnect with ourselves. And then there is the belief that ‘ we are not the most important person in our lives’. We believe everyone should take precedence because they need the support. So our needs, desires & wants become secondary . However, WE ARE the most important person and in coming to a genuine realisation about this can be a truly devine revelation and in fact may provide the impotece for us to make the changes we unknowingly desire Then finding the courage & determination to take the time out to commit to ourselves is also imperative to the awakening. One might go as far as to say that ‘taking the time to do the inward journey’ is the lifeblood to discovering our inner most wants, desires and true identity’ and believing we are worth it can only empower us to go on. The end result could be one of great personal rewards; sheer joy, aliveness, vitality and love. I am just beginning my journey and I guess I’m somewhat of a late bloomer. But I am really excited about reconnecting with myself. For me, the key is remembering when I used to wake up in the morning with a sense of excitement about the day, but there was nothing in particular to get excited about. I had this innate sense of aliveness and invigoration. I could smell the different aromas in the air, feel the sun gently toast my skin, the breeze blowing against my body and the rejoice in the life around me. Happiness was a free and so was my soul.
These shifts in my libido and interest in sex have been very dramatic through out each month since I became a mother last year. Thanks for explaining all the highs and lows and hormonal shifts. It definitely helps me to feel “normal” and not like a total crazy woman!! You do amazing work. Thanks for sharing your gifts!!!
Great read! Thanks
Thank you for your core message. It is really inspiring and something delicious.
and yes I want to share!!
Finally, it all makes sense! Thanks so much for this priceless knowledge, Saida. I am further encouraged to keep delving deeper – into myself.
I like the added view of anatomic chemistry. It’s recognizable and encouraging
I wonder how to get more information out about the old woman who is well past menopause and has reached a so far undocumented stage of her sexual life? Rather than closing down, as is common, it seems she is embracing a new world
Morgan, this is a really good question! In fact, we need more information, not only from studies done on ‘ailing’ elders, but also done on ‘thriving’ elders.
I so encourage you Morgan to write down your experiences, and call on all our thriving elders to share what they are discovering and know about staying alive, open and expressed in life with their sexuality. x
Thank you for this post, Saida. All of this makes so much sense & is comforting for me, as I’m always perplexed by the way I seem to go in & out of arousal & indifference.
I’m actually curious to know where these phases — High, Low, Neutral, & Reverse, as well as our Blooming & Cocooning — land on our calendars (i.e., High Phase on day 8 of our cycle). Do you have any information you can share with us about that? It would be nice to chart it out & know when to expect & respect those phases.
Thank you for all you do.
Ev’Yan, what I normally recommend is that you spend time noticing your own cycle and making notes on a calendar as no one women is specific to a ‘set of pre-determined’ days. For example, my doctor was very clear that precisely 14 days after I ovulate, I will menstruate, but that has not been true in my LIVING experience. See if you can start mapping your own moods on your calendar and notice if a pattern emerges.
I forgot to ask where can we see the responses to our questions about this article?
Yes, I would like a comments section!
I was taught that the progesterone stage of the cycle had a higher libido than the estrogen stage, is this correct?
Paulette.
It can be, but what is amazing about women is that we respond differently to the same cycle! Some women get very very turn-on when others do not, so we must consider the other factors in our life too.
LOVE this Saida!!! It is such an empowering reminder to honor all faces of the goddess!
That was a great article. Could you write an equivalent article for your readers who are in menopause when there are no sexual hormone gears relative to the phase of life when women are menstruating?
Yes! I will write one for menopause women soon! You do have hormones for the rest of your life, but not regulated by the fertility cycle… Coming soon!
Looking forward to the book on menopause! Really need some help on keeping my libido during menopause
Love your encouragement! Meanwhile, Dr. Northrup has a sweet little book out called: The Secret Pleasures of Menopause. I had the personal pleasure of contributing to this book and feel it has some important pieces to share with you.
I have read “the Secrets of Menopause” by Dr. Northrup. I am not overweight, I regulalry practice yoga and meditation, eat gluten-free, taken a wealth of dietary supplements, do not smoke, have text-book perfect blood pressure. I understand the importance of nitiric oxide from reading her book. Notwithstanding the above, and practicing many of the other things she recommends in her book, I do not have the abundance of nitric oxide she talks about..
I look forward to your articles – maybe a separate one for women in peri-menopuase and for those who are in full menopause?
Absolutely Ruth! This is coming soon! What is missing from that book is deep instruction on activating your ‘yoni-pulse’… I will be releasing an article on this soon. This can be done regardless of age or background. Quick question: Do you do all those things with utter delight or are you going through the motions?